EN
From now on, I'll post in two languages.
When I got access to the multi-language audio on all my YouTube channels, I thought I’d finally be able to start posting videos in English and Portuguese on the same channel. But when I tried the feature, I quickly realized that dubbing the videos with my voice would be much harder than recording two full videos in both languages. However, I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool that would be, and maybe that’s what triggered another idea, a ‘why not?’ moment.
Embracing the Mess
I currently have two separate blogs mainly because of the mess categories or tags create when I use the same blog to write in both languages. For example, if you filter the posts by “obsidian”, the list will contain articles in both languages. I ended up opting for two separate blogs because I’m not a developer and have no intentions of having a complex multi-language site. Furthermore, I enjoy the simplicity and social integrations Micro.blog has.
But what if I embrace the mess? And by “I”, I mean you! 😂
The Tiny Theme, which is what I use on my blog, has a Microhook for the navigation menu, meaning I can set it up however I want. My idea was to use PT and EN categories for the posts and use those to create separate menus for the pages and a timeline in each language.
After a few hours of going back and forth with Gemini, we came up with a pretty cool solution to switch from one language to the other. But since all other categories are basically the same in both languages, there will be no separation in the list of posts if a category filter is used.
It’s a bit messy, but it’s also how my brain works. This post in particular will probably be translated because it’s an explanation of what’s happening to the blog, but my posts are rarely translated. Sometimes I feel like writing in English; other times, I prefer Portuguese.
Merging the Socials
Anyway, since I’m doing this with the blog, I also decided it would be a good idea to unify my social media accounts as well. Currently I have two Mastodon and two Bluesky accounts, and that’s a lot of work. So, expect posts in both languages there as well.
Oh, you can also expect missing menus, pages, and posts while I merge everything into a single blog.
This is just the latest chapter in my two-blog problem that’s been haunting me since forever.
Welcome to the newly merged (and slightly chaotic) blog!
I’m finally down to a single template with every property I need, which greatly simplifies the process of creating #Obsidian Bases tables. 🫣 What about enough screen space for taking notes?
My own voice in another language! (YouTube Dubbing Upgrade)
I dubbed one of my videos using YouTube’s Multi-language Audio and even though the result was only good enough, I believe it ended up much better than the AI alternative.
The video below has two audio tracks recorded by me: the original in Portuguese and an additional one in English. If your YouTube account isn’t set to Portuguese, you should be hearing it in English.
This Multi-language Audio feature is a much better option in comparison to the AI-created auto-dubbing, but it is a lot of work. I spent the morning doing some tests, and I noticed that to achieve a good enough video, a lot of preparation has to be done.
To upload your own dubbing track, go to the
Video Detailspage on YouTube Studio, selectLanguages, then click theAdd languagebutton, choose the language, and, finally, click onAddnext toDubto upload your file.
At least for now, it doesn’t look like YouTube is doing anything to make sure one track is perfectly aligned with the other. It even recommends having dubbed audios with the same length as the original. This means I had to script the video, record it in one language, and then, when recording the other, I had to make sure it would end up at around the same duration.
It may not look like it, but that was a ton of work. And this is as basic as a video can get. The amount of work it would take to do this on one of my how-to videos, for example, is too much compared to just recording two separate videos. And that’s what I believe YouTube should be doing.
Creators who speak and record in more than one language should be able to upload entire videos in different languages. Depending on the settings of who’s watching, YouTube would play the better-matching video. That would be a game changer.
For now, I’ll only be dubbing just some of my videos - most likely the ones where I’m sharing the screen most of the time.
Nevertheless, this is one more important step towards making creators' content reachable by people from anywhere in the world.
Obsidian and my two-blog problem hunting me since forever.
As you may remember, I have two websites: one in Portuguese and another in English. This is something I have to constantly take into account when looking for hosting, social media, and, honestly, almost any other online activity.
When I was using Obsidian Publish, I ended up creating /en and /pt sections in the same site, but that came with several problems back then and now. For example, Micro.blog offers up to a five-blog plan, but all the posts go to the same ActivityPub feed. That’s not ideal when the blogs have different topics or languages. So, when I decided to move back to Micro.blog, I opted for two different blogs, which immediately created another problem.
I use the Micro.publish plugin to post from Obsidian, and of course, it has to be logged in to my Micro.blog account, which is now two accounts.
The first idea I came up with to fix this was to create two new vaults, one for each blog. Technically speaking, that worked very well. But it didn’t take long to see how incompatible it was with the way I use Obsidian. My notes and files are all interconnected using tags, properties, and even links. For example, I might create a trip journal note and link that to a blog post, or use an image from a note in a post. The web of connection is so deep that when I moved both blogs to different vaults, it broke many links. So, I’m back to having both blogs in my main vault.
After giving it some thought, I came up with a workaround that, to be honest, is not 100% safe. Each site has its own directory in my vault, and my main Obsidian is connected to the Portuguese Micro.blog account. Then, I created a nested vault using the English site subfolder and connected that second vault to my other Micro.blog account.
Yes, that’s a recipe for disaster if one is not careful.
To make it less prone to making a big mess, I took some precautions. The second vault now has a red accent color to make it clear I’m in a dangerous zone. In addition to that, I changed the Default location for new attachments to Same folder as current file and the New link format to Shortest path possible.
To be entirely transparent, saving attachments in the same folder is something I started experimenting with a few days ago, when I went on a trip and only used Obsidian on my phone for 10 days. That was an experience in itself, as I noticed how tricky it can be to use the app on a phone 100% of the time, but that’s a story for another day.
Back to the multiple-blog problem. Yesterday, I posted a test from the second vault, and it worked flawlessly. This will be the second post from there, but this one has links, tags, and other potential failure points.
Anyway, this multiple-language situation has been haunting me since I started my first website back in 1997, and I believe it will stick with me forever.
Morning of day two of a spectacular trip camping with my wonderful wife and lovely dog in Spain and France. Along the way, we stopped at so many random places to contemplate the view and even make coffee. It was such a great adventure.
We are now on our final stretch heading home, but I’ll never forget the richness of this experience.
I’m super impressed by the new #Supernote digest feature. It not only gives me a reason to go back to their #ePub reader (we’ll see about that), but it also solves a problem I’ve been struggling with for a long time: capturing and saving snippets from physical media.
Once I switched my site back from Obsidian Publish to Micro dot blog, I needed a way to make sure I had a copy of all my posts in #Obsidian. It would also be good to keep track of the progress of all the article and video ideas I have. After giving it some thought, I came up with a system that combines #Kanban and the Timeline System, and I’m excited about it.
Roman Mars' thoughts on efficiency on @99pi.org E641 were so profound that I had to relisten to the segment many times. It completely changed how I’ll think about it from now on. Many thanks, @romanmars.bsky.social. And congrats on the 15th anniversary.
I was counting down the minutes to start playing with #Obsidian Bases, but I knew something as cool as that would mean disrupting so many other projects in progress. Today, I finally started playing with it, and I’m glad I hadn’t done it before. Wow! 😳 The potential is blowing my mind!
🎉 I finally found my GeoCities address!
For a long time, I’ve been going through all these #GeoCities archives, searching for everything I remember having on that first site I ever created. I tried the title of the site, content I remembered, and so on. But because the results never contained the page itself, I kept ignoring them. This time, I don’t know why—maybe out of curiosity—I decided to open some of the pages, and boom! One of them had a link to my page.
Finally finding the address was so exciting, but unfortunately, the oldest archive I could locate is from 1999, which is too new. It’s a more modern version of the website, not the first one I created. But at least I now have something more precise to keep my archaeology interests alive.
[Update] Just found out that the archived site from 1999 has this at the bottom of the page: © Copyright 1997 - Vladimir Campos. Meaning that I believe it is fair to say that my first website was published in 1997. Almost 30 years ago 😳
Careful. This can mess up your Obsidian Vault settings.
What you are about to read is a real story that happened to one of my clients recently.
Let me start with some context. This is a person who was an Evernote user and who recently switched to Obsidian. He contacted me to help him with his company’s workflow and also with his personal life organization.
We started with the personal life part, and as I was showing him how to set up the Timeline System, I was also sharing some Obsidian good practices. There was a lot to do, and that’s why I was gradually introducing him to the system and adding plugins as he needed them. All that to say that it was a bit frustrating for him to see everything going away so easily.
When he shared his screen, the accent color he had already changed was back to the default purple, all the plugins were gone, and there were other small problems here and there. I could clearly see that something had happened to the Obsidian settings folder, but when I asked if he had done something to it, he told me he didn’t even know about it. Just in case, I decided
As I mentioned the other day, migrating to EU services is much harder than I thought. Creating the redirect rules was proving to be more complex than I anticipated, especially since I also have a website in Portuguese, which is now on a separate domain. Anyway, I would rather not waste your time with this massive can of worms. Long story short, I moved the website domain back to .com. At least it’s still hosted on an EU server.
The Global Search and Replace is yet another incredibly useful #Obsidian plugin that lets us find and change specific text in several notes at once. It really helped me with my most recent project, where I had to change a few details in so many notes.